


The Compromise

by squarizona



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-16
Updated: 2013-06-16
Packaged: 2017-12-15 03:37:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/844846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squarizona/pseuds/squarizona
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How the hell does one go on a date, anyway?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Compromise

**Author's Note:**

> this is a commission that I did for suzy! it was great fun, especially for my ride-or-die ship. (also I know I've been MIA for months and months; it's just a thing that happens that I can't really explain except that I'm the worst ever ever ever.)

As he should’ve expected, nothing was going according to Courfeyrac’s plan.

Committed relationships—at least the idea of them—were a strange new game to him, and he was trying to win. Being a romantic at heart wouldn’t cut it anymore—he now had to be ruthlessly charming and unfaltering in displaying it.

Besides, he really liked the guy. Courfeyrac had fears that were completely justifiable based on prior experience: big dogs, long silences, turbulence on airplanes, and the word love. But he could say he _really liked_ Combeferre because it wasn’t quite so threatening, a little safer, more volatile in the way that he could slip out of it if he decided it wasn’t for him. Making a reservation for dinner was just a little more firm planning than he would’ve preferred, but he had to learn how to make sacrifices if he wanted to win, and he damn sure wanted to win. He really liked the guy. And Combeferre deserved it, with how hard he’d been studying and working. Courfeyrac could win his honor by winning this little game thing. He would’ve been bothered by his logic that he would prefer his relationships to have an unhealthy dose of instability if he wasn’t being mugged in the alley just a block away from the stoop of the flower shop.

This is what he lost, in order of importance to him: most of the bouquet of chrysanthemums, orange daisies, asters, and lilies he’d just bought (crushed in the commotion), wallet, watch, shoes, a little bit of blood thanks to a well-placed punch, and dignity (whatever was left of it, anyway). He decided to walk the two miles to Combeferre’s apartment, wearing thin patches soon to become holes in his socks. He took the steps up to the door one at a time, work clothes stuck to his skin by persistent sweat. By then, it was dark. He went to check his watch before remembering that it was long gone. He really didn’t want to know how late he was when he thought about it. His right hand wrapped around a lily and two daisies that had survived the journey; the left curled into a fist and beat on the door.

“I give up,” he said with resolve, holding the three flowers out when Combeferre answered the door. The orange light from the living room lamp spilled out on the stoop, a shock to the darkness.

Combeferre bit back a laugh, leaning on the doorframe. He was drying his hands with a dishtowel. “I’m sorry?”

“I’m late, I’m sweaty, and I tried to bring you flowers but…” Courfeyrac held up the surviving flowers, stems strangled from his white-knuckled grip. “Yeah.”

Combeferre took them, laying them out in his open hand. “They’re lovely.” He smiled. “I love them.”

“There were more,” Courfeyrac said, looking over his shoulder as if that explained anything.

“Where are your shoes? Oh god—what _happened_?”

“Nowhere,” Courfeyrac said. “Nothing.” He pulled his bottom lip, swollen and aching as it was, and he could taste the pinch of iron in the blood.

After a painful bit of silence galloped by, Combeferre nudged the door open with his foot and tilted his head to indicate ‘come in,’ to which Courfeyrac complied. “I’m gonna put these in water.”

“I don’t know if it’s even worth it—I think I killed them,” Courfeyrac mumbled. He felt too volatile here; there was nothing to distract him, no shoelaces to tie, no watch to mess with.

“Oh, whatever,” Combeferre called from the kitchen where he ran the tap. He cut the stems off just above where they’d been crushed and set them in a coffee cup. “Did you call the police?”

“Nothing happened,” Courfeyrac said, watching him from the kitchen doorway and wondering if there was always Radiohead playing from the kitchen stereo or if this was somehow a special occasion.

“You should’ve,” Combeferre said, wetting the corner of a clean dishrag and handing it to him.

Courfeyrac pressed it to his lip. “But that would make _sense_ and take away from the mystery surrounding my personality.”

Combeferre smiled at him. “There’s no mystery to you. Don’t press too hard or you’ll make the split worse.” He turned back to the kitchen.

“Do you know what time it is?” Courfeyrac asked, wandering over to the desk near the window. He picked up a frame by the edges and tilted it back to catch some light from the streetlamp, obscuring his reflection; inside the frame, Combeferre, looking maybe sixteen or seventeen, wearing a terribly kitschy Christmas sweater and standing beside his horde of siblings. Courfeyrac was in the middle of counting them when he saw the shadow shift in the kitchen, and he immediately put it down.

“About nine. Why?”

Courfeyrac could hear him shutting the refrigerator door. Despite his best efforts to remain cool, Courfeyrac could feel a strain in his throat that he associated with scraped knees, failing tests, and ruining a good thing—disappointment, a lasting ache. “We missed dinner.”

“Dinner?” Combeferre rounded the corner into the living room, not bothering to hide the skepticism on his face. Courfeyrac was either struck with a sudden awful fever or was blushing; either way, he wasn’t about to say anything about it. “Was that the plan?”

Courfeyrac rolled the kitchen rag in his hand. “Maybe. Maybe my plan was to take you to a fancy restaurant.”

Combeferre smiled again, twisting his head in just enough of a shake to make Courfeyrac detect a hint of condescension. “It’s a nice thought, but it’s really too much.”

Courfeyrac flushed, and he would’ve had a comeback, but he was distracted by Combeferre popping the cap off a beer bottle while it was balanced precariously on his knee. “You don’t drink beer,” he said suspiciously when the bottle was handed to him.

“That’s for you,” Combeferre said, gesturing back towards the kitchen. “I keep it in the fridge for when you come over. Wine for me.”

“You keep beer on deck for me?” Courfeyrac said, trying to sound unimpressed. He took a sip and held the bottle against his lip.

“Should I not?” Combeferre placed the beer cap face up on the table. “You have this habit of showing up at my apartment every now and then in need of alcohol.” He nodded towards the couch where the tv was paused on an image of ladies sitting in a garden before starting back towards the kitchen. “You can sit down if you want, I’ll order take-out—I’m like six episodes behind on Game of Thrones. Or if Highgarden’s not your thing, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares is on Netflix Instant…”

Strange that he should be so welcome. Strange that he would just slip right in to this evening without so much as a ripple. He could feel the hardwood floor through the worn holes in his socks. “Wait,” Courfeyrac said, and Combeferre turned on his heel. “Did you set this up or something?”

“Tell me you’re not drunk already,” Combeferre said.

“Are you not upset about dinner?”

Combeferre looked towards the couch where his laptop sat closed in the middle. “We can order whatever you want, it’s not a big deal—“

“It _is_ a big deal,” Courfeyrac said, “because I don’t _break_ dates, because I don’t _make_ dates at all to begin with, and I can’t do a single nice thing for you without fucking it up!” Combeferre started to say something, but Courfeyrac was a whirlwind conscientious enough to set the bottle down. “I made a _reservation_ —I _dressed nice_ —!“ Courfeyrac gestured down at himself. “This—wallet-less, watch-less, shoeless, bleeding—is _not_ how it was supposed to go.”

Combeferre had been standing by, nodding understandingly. “Well,” he finally said. “I guess that depends on what one hopes to get out of a date.”

The moment of silence that followed was broken by something like a laugh from Courfeyrac. “Are you suggesting something?”

“Oh god, no,” Combeferre laughed. He lifted a latched door on an old bookshelf and scanned his wine options. Courfeyrac couldn’t read the titles from where he stood, but he felt a combination of jealousy and awe in the names and volumes he might’ve seen. “And will you please sit down? You’re making me nervous—it looks like you’re about to haul off and punch me in the face.”

He did, but he didn’t notice it until he looked across the living room at his reflection in the window that faced the road. He undid his stress in sections at a time: unclench the hands, relax the shoulders, rub the dried blood out of the collar. He straightened his tie and turned on his heel. “Better?”

Combeferre pulled a corkscrew out of a drawer in the bookshelf and looked up. He smiled. Courfeyrac wondered how someone could find so many opportunities to smile. “You look very handsome, as always.”

“Well, this is a date, right?” Courfeyrac sat upright on the couch, checking his hair in the window. “I don’t know how dates work.”

“Formal dates,” Combeferre said, bottle of chardonnay in one hand and computer in the other, as he slid onto the couch, slipping his feet under Courfeyrac. “Are typically a commodity, a marketable gimmick capitalized on by the wealthy who have seen too many rom-coms.” He set his computer on the floor and worked the corkscrew. “I like this better.”

“Oh,” Courfeyrac said. He wanted to say ‘I wish you’d have told me that before I tried to surprise you with a fancy dinner date,’ but he was distracted by the veins in Combeferre’s hands.

“I called my sister and she said she couldn’t believe you’d actually plan out a date,” Combeferre laughed. “I said I’d give you a chance to make it work if you really wanted to.” He pulled the cork off the screw and tossed it through the doorway to the kitchen. “I’ll pick it up later.”

Courfeyrac pulled the dishrag out of his pocket and wrapped it around the bottom of his bottle to have something to do with his hands. “So you wouldn’t have been surprised anyway,” he said, looking at his lap. “You knew it all along?”

“Oh, yeah.” Combeferre sipped straight from the bottle. “I didn’t want to burst your bubble. I thought it was really nice.”

Courfeyrac wanted to ask how he knew, but instead he sighed, “Sorry I’m so shitty at this.”

“You’re not,” Combeferre said, smiling as he picked up Courfeyrac’s hand and kissed his knuckles. “You’re here. We’re together. That’s the most important thing.” He reached up to cut off the lamp next to the couch, pressed play, and gave Courfeyrac a brief rundown of the earlier half of the episode. After about five minutes of silence except for the tv, Courfeyrac looked over at Combeferre, lit up in the glare from the screen, taking sips from the bottle shamelessly, eyes squinted in concentration like it was his life’s mission to figure out what would happen next before the screenwriters told him, and understood.


End file.
